Google+ Sparks and Hangouts

ISSN: 1693-6930 TELKOMNIKA Vol. 10, No. 2, June 2012 : 379 – 388 382 with friends and family, but because it gives you the optiontoselect who gets which types of messages, it can be useful in a business situation as well.Users are informed about new messages via both e-mail and a notification button at the top right of the main window. This notification also appears on your Gmail window. Nonetheless, communicating with people is not quite as apparent as it at first sounds, probably because Google+ has a limited number of members at this point. For now, most of the users you put into circles cannot communicate with you directly on Google+. Alternatively, theyll just get an e-mail, which depreciates the usefulness of Google+ considerably. Until Google+ enters more boundless distribution, it will remain more a test bed than a useful communications tool. 2.2. Google+ Sparks and Hangouts Circles are the centre of Google+, but theres more to the social networking service as well. Sparks connects together the best of Google and the social networking - it is anintelligent way to find and share content that interests you and could interest people contained in your circles. Sharing content in Sparks with all your followers or with specific circles and individuals is made rather easy by just a simple click of the share button. Select the Sparks button, and you will be presented with list of general topics, such as Sports, Fashion, Movies and so on. Select any of the topics on this list, and a stream of content will appear relating to the topic, including blog posts, news articles and videos. Users can also construct your own topics to follow by typing in a search term, clicking the search button, and then clicking a button labelled Add interest all being quite self-explanatory. Figure 1. Google+ hangout in progress An additional feature, Hangouts, gives users the ability to videoconference with others in their circles. Users can create a hangout and preferentially invite others to join, or just wait for others to join; a message that the user has created a hangout will be displayed in the stream of people in their circles.For users who enjoy videoconferencing will find this a convenient way to video chat with friends via webcam. Its reallystraight forward to use, and requires that you have the necessary equipment webcam and a microphone. If the user does not have a webcam, they can make avail of the audio only option.Google+ has an easy interface to share photographs with other users. Users can create individual photos or entire photo collections available to certain circles or to everyone in all of the users circles. The photograph feature ties directly into Picasa, which means its quite easy to find the photographs and albums a user wishes to share. Users can also see all the photographs that others have shared with them. TELKOMNIKA ISSN: 1693-6930 Google+ vs Facebook: The Comparasion Kevin Currant 383 3. Walkthrough Comparison of Google+ and Facebook